Staten Island resident Louis Scarcella says he did nothing wrong during an interview with the Advance earlier this spring.Jan Somma-Hammel

Two months after a high-profile 1990 murder case he investigated was thrown out, dozens more convictions associated with a retired NYPD detective from Staten Island are under review, prosecutors said Saturday.

About 50 cases worked by Detective Louis Scarcella will be reopened by the Brooklyn District Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit, a spokesman confirmed. Prosecutors are casting a critical eye as Scarcella's work after a judge threw out the conviction of a man accused of killing a Brooklyn rabbi.

A man who answered a phone listed under the name Louis Scarcella wouldn't comment Saturday, but Scarcella told The New York Times he didn't expect prosecutors to find anything. The Times first reported the investigation.

Scarcella has been credited with solving sensational cases that gave the city a scary reparation -- and helping elevate the reputation of the city's detectives. He credited his ability to connect with suspects for his success gaining confessions in high-profile crimes.

In an interview with The Associated Press, he said he fed meals to suspects, allowed them to see their girlfriends and even got down on his knees to pray with a man he was interrogating.

But in March a judge threw out the second-degree murder conviction of David Ranta, who spent more than two decades behind bars in the slaying of Holocaust survivor Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger.

Scarcella was the lead detective on that case, and has said his coaxing got Ranta to confess he was in on a botched robbery that led to the rabbi's killing.

Prosecutors filed papers saying they supported a defense motion to vacate the murder conviction and dismiss the indictment. After a recent review, they said they "no longer have sufficient evidence to prove the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."

The case against Ranta began to unravel in 2011 when prosecutors from the Conviction Integrity Unit began their review.

That's the year a man named Menachem Lieberman approached Ranta's trial lawyer to tell him he "had uncertainty and discomfort" with his identification of Ranta, and later gave the unit a sworn statement recounting how a detective had told him to "pick the one with the big nose" -- Ranta -- out of a police lineup.

Other interviews done by the unit suggested an alleged accomplice-turned-prosecution witness -- now dead -- had pinned the shooting on Ranta to save himself. A woman also repeated claims that her deceased husband privately confessed he was the killer.

The unit also found gaps in police paperwork intended to document their investigation. And Ranta denied he knowingly signed police file folders with statements saying he'd helped plan the robbery.

Scarcella has worked many high profile cases that led to convictions, including two teens accused of killing of a transit worker by torching a subway token booth.